♦ The Volcker rule is contentious, but it is not the knockout blow some people had expected.
♦ The economically sensible wing of the US Republican party doesn’t exist, says Paul Krugman.
♦ Iran and Israel have paid tribute to Mandela, while choosing to remain a safe distance from the memorial.
♦ Marc Lynch explains why nobody in the Middle East deserves to be on the Foreign Policy Leading Global Thinker list this year.
♦ After cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s interior ministry has turned its attention to the activist community of journalists, non-Islamists and students.
♦ The Australian speaks to a mother in Iraq who is waiting for her son’s execution to be announced after a “hanging day”. Read more

Not many letters to the FT go viral. But KN Al-Sabah’s pithy explanation of the intricacies of Middle East politics, deservedly garnered a wide audience. It read as follows:

Sir, Iran is backing Assad. Gulf states are against Assad. Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi. But Gulf states are pro Sisi! Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood! Read more

Remember the neocons? They were the powerful and controversial group of thinkers who argued that the promotion of democracy in the Middle East was the key to winning the “war on terror”. The influence of the neocons peaked during the Bush administration, when they became vocal advocates for the invasion of Iraq.

Many of the critics of the neocons always argued that all this talk of “democracy” was simply a hypocritical mask for the promotion of US or Israeli interests. So I was interested to see how leading neocon thinkers have reacted to the coup in Egypt and the assault on the Muslim Brotherhood. Have they kept the democratic faith, or have they gone along with the military? Read more

If you are going to intervene in a foreign country, it helps to know what you want to happen. But on Egypt – and Syria, too – western policy is buffeted by a mass of conflicting instincts. The US and the EU are pro-democracy but anti-Islamist; pro-stability but anti-crackdown; opposed both to jihadists and to their enemies in the security state. No wonder that the Arab world is confused. The one thing that unites the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood is that they both claim to have been betrayed by the US. Read more

In a rambling weekend statement, Egypt’s state information service complained of “severe bitterness” towards some western media coverage, which it deemed “biased” in favour of the Muslim Brotherhood. Forget that the Brothers had won legislative and presidential elections and are now facing one of the most brutal crackdowns in their more than 80-year history; they are, says the statement, terrorizing citizens, killing innocent people, and attacking the police. And they are being aided in their devious acts by al-Qaeda.

The police and army, meanwhile, are the heroes who have rushed to protect the people and their revolution and are now standing in the face of “terrorist” attempts to “fling the country into violence.”

Expressing dismay that several western media have been focusing on the outraged reaction of some western governments, the statement recommends that they pay closer attention to the support in Egypt’s war against terrorism delivered by the likes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (the autocratic supporters of the anti-Brotherhood campaign.) Read more

What comes after the crackdown in Egypt?
The Egyptian army’s efforts to clear supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood from camps around Cairo has led to hundreds of deaths and a deepening political crisis. So what is the future for Egypt, and how is the rest of the world likely to react? Heba Saleh, Cairo correspondent, and David Gardner, senior international affairs commentator, join Gideon Rachman.

What General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his colleagues have done is to restore the security state – an action that should not be confused with re-establishing security.

This restoration is edging towards the status quo ante the Tahrir revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak in 2011. It started before the coup, with the constitution Morsi and the Brothers railroaded through last December. Most of the controversy excited by this Islamist-tinged charter was caused by the way it ignored liberal, Christian and women’s concerns over fundamental rights and freedoms. Alarmingly little attention was paid to the way the Brotherhood sought to co-opt the military by embedding the army’s privileges and prerogatives even beyond the powers it enjoyed under Mubarak.Read more

By Catherine Contiguglia
♦ The violence in Egypt has put Western diplomacy in a quandary that goes beyond a face-off between principles and interests, says Gideon Rachman. The United States and Europe must condemn the violent crackdown and cannot back a violent anti-democratic group, but by withdrawing all support from the current military government, they may find themselves powerless to influence events.
♦ International efforts to bring the warring camps in Egypt to the negotiating table have failed, but in order to end the violence, more diplomacy will be needed the FT writes in an editorial. Washington must suspend aid to Egypt’s military until parties agree to talks, the release of Mohamed Morsi must be on the table, and pressure needs to be exerted on the Muslim Brotherhood with the help of Turkey and Qatar.
♦ In choosing to not respond strongly to the violence in Egypt, the United States seems to be missing how grave this development is for Egypt and the region, writes Michael Hirsh in the National Journal. Hopes for a moderate Muslim participation in democracy are dashed, and extremism will likely replace it, while Egypt could end up reverting to a military junta regime.
♦ Amidst the horror, blood and mud within the camps of Morsi supporters, the work from an improvised gallery of comic artists from Brotherhood-affiliated papers continues to paper the walls.
♦ The idea of democracy for any potential Muslim voter was destroyed in the violence in Egypt, writes Robert Fisk in the Independent, and though what the future holds is unclear, what is certain is the initial feeling of unity that came with the Arab Spring no longer exists in Egypt.
♦ The most disturbing question raised by the violence in Egypt, writes Issandr El Amrani on the Arabist blog, is whether the escalation of violence is part of the desired goal, rather than a consequence. Some liberals who came out in favour of the coup of Mohamed Morsi may have thought it would lead to a better transition to democracy, but they were in the minority – most “appear to have relished the opportunity to crush the Muslim Brothers.”
♦ The US under-the-radar approach to the leadership in Egypt following the coup of Mohamed Morsi may have been appropriate to facilitate negotiations, but that time has passed, writes Marc Lynch in Foreign Policy. After the bloody crackdown on Morsi supporters, the United States must step away from the current regime.
♦The failure of the United States to follow their own laws and suspend aid to Egypt following the coup of Mohamed Morsi in which the army played a “decisive role” makes them complicit in the bloody crackdown on Morsi supporters, the Washington Post writes in an editorial. Their continued resistance to calling Morsi’s ouster a coup even after the crackdown is self defeating as continued support of the military will lead to a dictatorship rather than restore democracy.
♦ It is still the Egypt of Hosni Mubarak, writes Steven Cook in Foreign Policy. Political leaders on all sides have promoted narrow interests at the expense of what is best for Egypt, including the Muslim Brotherhood that carried on in Mubarak’s tradition of “whoever ruled could do so without regard to anyone who might disagree.” Read more

Supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi are detained by security forces at the Rabaa al-Adawiyya protest camp. Getty

Egypt’s security forces on Wednesday launched a much-anticipated operation to clear supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi from two protest camps in the capital, leaving scores dead and prompting protests around the country from Mr Morsi’s Islamist sympathizers, who clashed with police and attacked churches in southern Egypt.

Polarisation between opponents and supporters of the president increased dramatically in the wake of the popularly-backed coup that removed Mr Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, from office on July 3. He has languished in detention since, prompting his supporters to accuse the security forces of undermining democracy. Opponents of the former president accuse him of trying to impose an Islamist vision on Egypt and say the military coup was needed to ‘save’ the country. International efforts to mediate between Mr Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood group and the interim government, backed by the powerful defence minister Gen Abdel Fattah Sisi, failed as neither side showed willingness to compromise.

As the Islamist protest camps became increasingly disruptive in the traffic-choked capital and leaks of an imminent operation to clear them grew, the protesters vowed they would remain until Mr Morsi was restored to power, with some claiming they would rather die as martyrs than give up their protest. Warnings by activists, rights groups and some politicians that their forcible removal could ignite a cycle of violence were ignored and the Arab world’s most populous nation is once again riven by unrest.

Here is our pick of background reads on the latest episode in Egypt’s turbulent transition.Read more

Chief justice Adly Mansour is sworn in as interim president the day after Mohamed Morsi is ousted (Getty)

Among Egyptians of all political stripes, there is a pervading conviction that talented and top-notch specialists who know their jobs well can help fix the nation’s myriad problems. The interim government installed by the military after the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi’s Islamist-dominated government has begun a flurry of appointments of so-called technocrats to key government posts.

It has appointed economist Hazem Beblawi as prime minister and named another noted economist, Ahmed Galal, as finance minister. It has begun assembling a constituent assembly that will be filled with experienced judges and legal experts. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN nuclear chief and Nobel laureate, has been sworn in as a vice-president for foreign affairs.

But the belief that a government of competent, cleverly-placed and politically neutral technocrats can solve problems as deeply entrenched as those Egypt faces is at best questionable and at worst fantasy. Read more

♦ With a debt burden of $18bn and city infrastructure plunging in quality, Detroit may have to file bankruptcy — an extremely rare act for so populous a city — and may even sell the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Egyptian soldiers stand guard on the streets of Cairo on Thursday (Getty)

If it looks like a military coup and has the effect of a coup – then it probably is a military coup. President Obama’s inability to use the “c” word, in relation to Egypt, is not because he has difficulty grasping what has happened. It is because, as soon as the United States declares that the Egyptian government has been overthrown by a coup, it is legally bound to cut off aid to Egypt.

Lying behind the question of whether to call this a coup lies a deeper western confusion. Western governments like to deal in clear moral categories: freedom-fighters versus dictators, democrats versus autocrats, goodies versus baddies. It makes foreign policy easier to understand, and easier to explain to the folks back home.Read more

♦ The Indian newspaper Patrika has achieved success through itsreputation for credibility – it doesn’t take political bribes, which is increasingly common among other Indian newspapers – and for public interest advocacy – it focuses on hyperlocal coverage.

The World

with Gideon Rachman

Gideon became chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times in July 2006. He joined the FT after a 15-year career at The Economist, which included spells as a foreign correspondent in Brussels, Washington and Bangkok. He also edited The Economist’s business and Asia sections.

His particular interests include American foreign policy, the European Union and globalisation.